Tuesday, August 29, 2017

In my last wall of text, I related my personal experiences as a gamer/customer in trying to support a Spartan Games product. In this post, I'll go through some of the pitfalls that Spartan both could have avoided as well as those that were out of their control; if Monday morning arm chair quarterbacking isn't your thing then it might be best to skip this post.

Halo, being a big licensed IP, was likely quite expensive to acquire as well as maintain. Additionally, to my knowledge, the Halo Fleet Battles product line was the first to feature outsourced styrene plastic models instead of the traditional resin in house manufactured models in their wholly owned game lines which likely also required a significant initial cost. That large amount of money needed upfront likely way over and above what Spartan was accustomed to made me wonder why they chose to do a space battle game as their initial foray. The Halo games absolutely feature some impressive space battle set pieces (one or two of which were playable in fighters) but the game focuses on small unit combat with special characters. Even in the multiplayer, the largest battle typically seen in most of the games was big team battle wtih 16 v 16. In a universe that seems to be tailor made for 28mm skirmish combat on the tabletop expandable to the occasional vehicle, Spartan instead chose to do yet another space battle game. Now I'm a fan of the genre who played my fair share of those types of games from FASA Star Trek (my first ever tabletop hobby game) to Babylon 5 (Wars and Fleet Action) to Full Thrust and even X-wing (albeit that last one is fighter centric and not capital ship focused). I had tried Firestorm Armada a couple of times and didn't find the bucket o' dice mechanics to my liking nor the resin brick models either. I was excited that the Halo line would include ship designs that I actually liked in a better IMO material but I always wondered despite my own bias why they decided to not only go with the obvious to me skirmish genre choice but also to cannabalize their own Firestorm Armada sales with a second space ship combat game.

Additionally, I was worried that Spartan's well established reputation of only focusing on one game at a time and switching focus before it was properly taken care of would continue. I hoped that they would not do this with such an expensive licensed IP but that sadly did not appear to be the case. The rules had issues that remained unaddressed for months and previewed follow up ships took months to arrive and when they did had serious casting issues that the company tried intially to dismiss. Without even a proper and critical look at the rules as well as the release of already shown ships, Spartan announced in less than 6 months the next Halo game in yet another genre (15mm mass battle) that wasn't well suited to the IP and yet again competed with another of their existing product lines (the 10mm Firestorm Planetfall) released a couple years earlier. Worse yet, the Halo Ground Battles products were deemed overly expensive by many gamers compared with other 15mm offerings with sales likely suffering along with perception. This of course was in addition to their Steampunk Dystopian Wars ground and naval ship game lines that had been languishing for a while seemingly at the time. Simply put... Spartan Games were seemingly living up to their reputation as a games company that couldn't properly focus on and support their existing lines before adding more to their plate. Additionally, both genres had increased competition throughout the
industry with games like Dropzone and Dropfleet Commander as well as
other new kickstarted IPs in both genres as well as the first inklings
from GW that specialist games like BFG and Epic might be making a return
as well.

On top of the issues above of their own making, it appears from the announcement that the owner, Neil, had some sort of serious health issue that precluded him from being as active in the company and it doesn't appear that anyone either was allowed and/or capable of acting in his stead so that the work flow suffered. Additionally, their big and expensive Halo IP had actually become less popular in terms of raw sales with the buggy Masterchief Collection and followup Halo 5 significantly underselling compared with previous titles overall on top of the overall decline of the xbox as a platform due to poor choices with Xbox One marketing and design. As I mentioned before, the expected (by me as well as my local store owner) local interest in the game simply never materialized and the poor choices by Spartan quickly eroded support that did come in. Since my departure in 2016 from regular Spartan community contact, they've hit the reset button again on their other two lines via Kickstarter. Dystopian World funded last year but was only partially delivered at the time of Spartan's closure. Firestorm Armada which had just gotten its 2nd edition in late 2014 a couple months prior to the Halo Fleet Battles announcement was getting a third revamp in the ongoing Galaxy Kickstarter when the closure was annouced. I'm not sure if any of their other lines got revamps as well in the meantime but I think that in the span of less than 3 years (late 2014 to mid 2017) that coming out with two completely new IPs and revamping two existing ones is quite a lot to do for a medium sized gaming company especially when those games directly compete with each other for the same gaming dollars. Finally, the sudden closure of *everything* Spartan literally overnight meant that fans were yet again left in a lurch as years worth of fan made and even official but optional rules and scenarios disappeared along with many hobby blogs hosted on the official forums with no backups. My own Halo hobby work here was simultaneously cross posted there and would be gone forever with no notice if I didn't also have a google blog.

I'll end this 2nd part the same way that I started the first. I wish the employees and owners of Spartan the best in the upcoming trying times as well as hope that their games and the fans that supported them land on their feet as well. Regardless of my thoughts on how the company was seemingly run (I can only go off of speculation, common sense, and my own experiences.. no insider info here!), there were likely dozens of folks living their dream jobs in the industry and thousands more enjoying the fruits of their work that will now be affected in some way or the other. I've toyed with the idea of selling my painted fleets but I think I'll keep them for use in some potential future game system or even a return to the agnostic Full Thrust rules that I previously enjoyed. Thanks to any potential readers out there for bearing with me on this likey typo ridden wall of text as I put down my thoughts on the subject.

Monday, August 28, 2017

Ashley over at the Paint it Pink Blog posted an article about the closure of Spartan Games last week and I figured I'd add my own thoughts (likely a two part series) on the subject as well given that I had (unsuccessfully) supported the Spartan Games' Halo Fleet Battles line in the past on this blog. Before getting into the specifics on my experience with Spartan, I'd like to also add that it's been a particularly bad week for mid to small sized games companies with the closure of Tor Gaming last week as well as the prior closure of On the Lamb games as well that wasn't publicized as much. I had never ordered from either company as their niche products didn't really scratch any of my own hobby itches but I have interacted with one of the owners of OTL on dakka in the past as was sad to hear about the closure. In any case, the following will probably be a semi-stream of consciousness wall of text so consider yourselves warned. The following blog posts/thoughts/guesses are my opinions going largely off of my own (occasionally flawed and admittedly biased) memory and experiences as well as publicly available information as I have zero insider knowledge of the behind the scenes happenings at Spartan. I'd normally quote more sources to back up some of my comments but all hands (including the official news blog and forums) went down suddenly with the Spartan ship last week with no backup on waybackmachine. In this first part, I'll start off with my own personal experiences and then later in the second post go over what I suspect lead to that downfall.

First off, I'll say that regardless of my thoughts that I'm never happy to see fellow gamers leaving the dream so to speak lose their job (some probably permanently in the industry). There were indeed some talented and dedicated folks at Spartan games and I wish them well in their future endeavors. That said... I fully believe that a large part of the failure of Spartan Games falls squarely on the shoulders on its leadership. When I first considered getting into Halo Fleet Battles shortly after its announcement, these are some of the responses in the dakka thread that greeted me from their current and former customers:

"Spartan Games is branching into yet another game?"

"They will only drop it six months down the line. Give the license to a company who will support it."

"Maybe they'll have a special clause in the contract stating they should at least show some effort and give it a full year?"

"I'm not surprised... but I do think it means they'll spread themselves
even thinner right when Planetfall needs (and deserves) full-time
nurturing to get it established."

"This announcement does leave me with mixed feelings, as I want to like
what Spartan has done recently in improving themselves, but I'm doubtful
they could support a 5th game/3rd universe already. Time will tell."

"I am looking forward to Halo 2.0 (which will really be the 4th iteration
of the same book and the 25th iteration of the same ruleset) in 18
months' time."

"I believe the sentiment is more about Spartan's somewhat lack of
attention span when it comes to their rules. Their first few years were
a never ending cycle of revisions and half measures and starting up new
games only to neglect them or other games. The new 2.0 rules mark a
change where they've finally sorted out the problems and more or less
established their 'core' products.
"

Dakka has a rep for being a bunch of grumpy grognards (largely amongst unscrupulous small companies and their white knights) but I've found that alot of truth is found in posts on independent forums since other locations like facebook and company specific forums truly give companies a pass (and clamp down on anything else) too often despite objectively consumer unfriendly moves. Obviously given the above comments (and this was NOT the first time I had heard about Spartan's reputation regarding long term support for their games), I can't claim to have gone into Halo with anything but my eyes open. I simply hoped that with such a likely expensive IP that they would treat it right. I was a bit surprised that they decided to take a video game that was almost exclusively about skirmish level combat focused on special characters and lead with a ship battle game but my own interest in the genre made me hope that it would be a success. Unfortunately, I was wrong on both accounts.

After buying into the game with the core set and later some ship add ons, I found out that no one else bought anything from the line at my store including the friend of mine who initially was supposed to be buying his own core set and splitting the contents with me (with one of us getting the humans and the other the aliens). That small initial shipment the owner ordered sat there on the shelf untouched until the store closed down the next year. When the local Spartan game demo reps showed up the month after the release of the game, I came to the store hoping to get in a demo as my own minis were as of yet mostly unassembled. The two company reps (two brothers) basically responded quite unprofessionally and angrily that they had zero interest in the game. They were firmly fans of the existing OTHER Spartan games spaceship game (Firestorm Armada) and had no plans to demo, support, or even try the game when I offered to bring in my own minis. They backtracked a bit later that evening with some more diplomatic "clarifications" of their earlier statements but their true feelings were quite obvious and were another warning sign for me.

Still mostly undaunted, I finished painting and assembling my minis now
for both fleets as I fully expected that I'd have to bring both painted
to realistically get anyone to try the game. I found the actual minis
to be of high quality and very intuitive to assemble. I did have some
issues with the packing leading to some damaged ship pieces and
Spartan was VERY generous in replacing the damaged parts. I had
expected them to send me just the damaged individual pieces but instead
they sent the entire sprues. During the time it took me to build and
paint my minis, I was active on the Spartan forums and kept hoping for
more new ships to come out and both bolster my fleets as well as more
importantly add some variant playstyles. Unfortunately, the half dozen upcoming ships previewed both at the pre-release Salute convention as well as at the big GenCon premiere (hinted as future plastic releases) mostly didn't materialize in that first key 6 months. Instead. the same three ships for each faction fromthe starter set were repackaged a myriad of times in different quanities and combinations with occasionally some minimally variant rules.

Finally around Christmas post release, the first of the ships previewed earlier finally came out in resin (instead of rumored plastic) and unfortunately had serious QA issues. The large ships were obviously 3D printed and Spartan hadn't even bothered to clean up any the 3D printing lines on the ships so they showed very obvious stepping from the prototyping process. When complaints were raised about those $85 (55 GBP) large centerpiece ships, the intial response on the forums and social media was to delete the complaints instead of addressing them. Obviously that did not go over well with folks who paid so much for those products and the complaints increased. Forum white knights started berating their fellow customers with the usual buck passing responses only further fanning the flames but eventually Spartan did the right thing and said they would address the situation. Ultimately, they were very generous in their resolution again just shipping full new replacement ships to customers who complained but the damage was already done. Folks like myself who witnessed the quality issues had already decided to wait and see what future ships would look like in person (or at least on the web post release) before ever ordering any of their resin products.

Over the next couple months, more ships were previewed but actual new releases were still a trickle (and strangely NOT the ships previewed almost 6 months earlier). Issues with the rules were largely ignored until they started dominating the conversation about the game at which point they'd get a quick one line fix for that single issue. Youtube channels that had covered the game previously either fell silent or announced they were dropping coverage of the game. At that point, I sold most of my remaining unbuilt ships leaving myself with only the damaged parts sprues that I had gotten replacements for as well as those I had painted and I put my follow up fighter/bomber stands project on hold (I had hoped to replace the tokens with tiny miniatures instead). This was in part a response to the worsening general tone of the conversation surrounding the game as well as my own personal inability to convince even a single person to just try the game when bringing two painted fleets to the FLGS. More resin ships were finally making some progress in the pipeline to arrive early next year when Spartan made the annoucement that mostly killed my remaining enthusiasm for the game and proved the dakka grognards correct... after 6 months and only two flawed and expensive new followup product releases, Spartan was pleased to announce the release of the NEXT Halo game... the 15mm Halo Ground Combat. At that point, I largely said my goodbyes on the official forums (and I certainly wasn't the first) but kept my painted ships just in case I had a future use for them in a generic ship combat game. Over the next couple of months, I saw some news about them finally releasing the ships previewed the year before as well as announcing a Second Edition of the game rules less than a year after the release of the game (another bulleye for the dakka crowd).

With the next blog post, I'll go over some of the issues that I think contributed to the failure of both the above Halo Fleet Battles game as well as that of the company that made it.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Apologies but after I found out about that song and the youtube meme it spawned, I had to incorporate it into the blog somehow! Hopefully the first test paint job won't turn anyone off. I've
historically been a competent tabletop quality painter and don't have
the skill nor the patience to learn the advanced techniques necessary to
get to that next tier. In any case, here is the first test model
painted up (but not based):

I ended up going with the polish eagle on the tabard as it didn't look
like it clashed too much with the aquilla in the end. Additionally, I
felt the model needed a bit of white in the center as well. I used
decal solvent on most of the decals to mixed results. It worked well
enough along with two relief cuts on the shoulder pads although the
ravenwing icon kinked a bit on one side (of course facing the front of
the model... and I didn't notice it until I was changing the sword on
the decal to a sabre!). The solvent practically disolved the first
eagle I put on the tabard literally in front of my eyes to a splotchy
dull off white so I had to rinse that one off in pieces; I suppose FOW
decals aren't compatible with testors decal solvent although GW
ones are. The air force symbol wouldn't fit properly on the knee cap
and was too small to put relief cuts into so I put it diagonally as a
diamond instead of the historical square.

I don't expect to change the overall scheme much on the second model
although I think I will change the order of painting operations
significantly the second time around. Washing and highlighting the base
armor was a PITA after the rest of the models was done so I think I'll
do all the steps involved in the silver/chainmail armor itself (base
coat, lighter top coat, two washes, cleanup and occasional edge
highlighting) before I touch the rest of the parts/colors. Decalwise, I
might switch to the slightly larger sized ravenwing decal for the
chapter symbol as there is alot of blank red space on that side as
well.

Keeping in mind my slightly better than tabletop quality skill level, I'd love to hear other possible tips that I could use.

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

It took some time but I lucked out in that I got all the bits I
needed to finish these two models and did some hobby work finally. I
was able to cut off the Blood Angel specific bits from the rondel
shields and I think they fit sizewise well over the axillae. Since this
model will likely be a champion, I added on a relic bolter along with a
1mm craft jewelry chain as a shoulder strap. I'm curious to know if
anyone thinks the model looks a bit too busy with all that added on.
Finally, I did end up switching the wings on my two test models and
definitely prefer this combo even if they're slightly less durable
overall. I primed the earlier model already and, at least on that
model, my reglues don't look too bad after scraping off any residue nor
does my gap filling attempt with the putty look too bad once painted
over.

I've also been putting more thought into my custom chapter symbols and
markings. None of my three attempts to get in contact with Plastic
Soldier Company resulting in any response so using the Armoured Hussar
logo is out for me as I don't know the appropriate size/measurements.
Using the polish eagle is both a bit on the nose IMO as well as would
clash a bit with the aquilla as well but I may use it occasionally as a
squad or campaign marking instead but definitely not on every model.
Another option I came up with would be to adapt the ravenwing icon into
looking like a winged saber. This option would be relatively free (I
have a decent amount of decals from 2nd ed and up) and easy to
accomplish as additional benefits on top of also being thematic.

Next up I'll finally be painting the first model as well as test fitting parts to my two lance armed honor guard models.

Friday, August 11, 2017

Scott Bell-Fleitas has done it again and is working on another cool looking set of starship plans. This time, however, it's an original design of his. I was interested in varying the style of ships I've featured and was already working on a single nacelle design of my own when he posted his first WIP shot. It was obviously leagues better than my own and he let me use his work instead for this sheet.

He's not quite done yet so the link above is to his Amazon storefront instead of to the potential future product. I like how he expanded on the classic Franz Joseph technical manual Saladin/Hermes ship style and updated it to more modern yet classic TOS asthetics.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Since my last hobby update, I ordered and received the second Lieutenant from the Dark Imperium starter set and finished mostly converting him to a Winged Hussar as well. I decided that he needed a sword as well and that the original sword wasn't "sabre" enough (it reminded me of a katana) for my liking so I ordered some bits off of an internation ebay seller. The bits arrived from Europe alot quicker then I expected and I did my best impersonation of an Iron Hand apothecary tonight with some amputations. I personally like the sharper, thinner look to the weapons as I think they look definitely less kitbashy and more like the sabres that inspired them. I had to admit though that they are extremely thin resin pieces so both models should definitely be labeled as fragile/handle with care. I already had to reglue last night a wing just holding a bit too tight while removing the previous mould lines.

I'm taking my time with this to not make any rash decisions in modeling (something that happened in my previous truescale attempt as I rapidly went from step to step in the same night) but I have to admit I'm still second guessing myself a bit. I chose the curved wings for the more serious Lt because their shape was sturdier on that model and vice versa but I think I prefer the wings the other way around. Also, I'm considering adding on a Rondel (or Besagew) to each axilla of the champion Lt (the other model won't accommodate them due to the shape). I had to look up the name but they're the circular discs that protect the vulnerable armpit in plate armor.

Just like before, these are just quick mockups made from slicing off the tips of left over sprue pegs and not the final bits. If anyone has any ideas on what parts to use for the rondels or even if they shouldn't be used at all, feel free to comment below.